Interview with Tamara
Munzner

Tamara Munzner is known for using
hyperbolic space to visualize the Web, knowledge, and organize web
sites. I caught up with her at lunch on Monday for this interview.

What first drew you to computer graphics?

Pattern-matching, actually. I had a summer job for three years at
a supercomputer company, which like most other supercomputer companies
eventually went bankrupt. When I was looking for another summer job,
somebody matched up my resume with a place called “The Geometry
Supercomputer Project”. That was a mathematics research group
which ended up creating good enough algorithms that it didn’t
need supercomputer-class power to create things like tilings of hyperbolic
space, and had gotten more and more interested in visualization on
workstations. I ended up doing interactive 3D graphics and RenderMan
that summer, and I’ve been addicted ever since.

Do you have any favorite CG mentors?

Pat Hanrahan – the stuff I did that first summer was based
on a project of his, and I ended up getting my PhD with him several
years later.

What was the first time you contributed to SIGGRAPH?

1994. We got eight whole minutes in the Electronic Theater, woo
woo! It was for “Outside In”, a mathematical visualization
video about turning a sphere inside out.

What year/city was your first SIGGRAPH? Which was most intense?
Why?

1992, in Chicago. It was the second conference I ever attended,
and I didn’t know many people at all. A very different experience
than now, where part of the fun is running into lots of old friends.
1995 was the most intense – I was doing two lectures in a
course and a panel talk. Plus I had something in the Animation Theater,
but that didn’t take any work during the conference itself.
Since I, ahem, am not the best at getting things done early, I showed
up at Siggraph not having slept in a couple of days. I almost lost
my voice during my talks, and discovered that I had bronchitis when
I got home after a long week. Also, part of my panel talk included
a live demo of 3D through the web that relied on a working Net connection
to a remote server. When I tested right before session, the remote
server didn’t work and my local backup was broken. I got up
to talk being fairly sure my demo wouldn’t work and I’d
look like an idiot, but luckily enough the remote connection did
indeed work.

What contributions to SIGGRAPH are you most proud of?

Outside In. Listening to the audience applaud your piece in the
Electronic Theater is an amazing rush.

What's your favorite thing at this year or last year's SIGGRAPH?

“Protrude, flow”, the metal blobby liquid thing in the
art show.

What near/intermediate developments in CG do you look forward
to?

Information visualization becoming a mainstream tool.

Tamara has finally escaped from
the Minneapolis - Stanford ping pong game she played for the
past decade.